The Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after stating he was investigating the Texas Senator, now says he will not.
Literally a few hours after stating he was investigating Ted Cruz over remarks the Texas Tea Party Senator had made during Tuesday night’s GOP debate, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr flip flopped and announced he would not be investigating Cruz.
“The committee is not investigating anything said during last night’s Republican presidential debate,†Sen. Burr said in a joint statement with ranking Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein.
But around noon today, Senator Burr had made an entirely different comment to reporters.
“I’m having my staff look at the transcripts of the debate right now,” Burr had announced.
“The question had been raised therefore I asked them to look at it and see if there was any validity to it,” Burr told reporters, NBC News reported. “Anytime you deal with numbers, and I think it dealt with numbers, the question is: Is that classified or not or is there an open source reference to it. So it’s not as clear as just reading what he said. We’ve got to search all sorts of media outlets to see if anybody had reported the number independently.”
In question were comments Senator Cruz said in a heated conversation at the presidential debate with fellow GOP Senator Marco Rubio.
As The New Civil Rights Movement reported this morning, after accusing Rubio of making “knowingly false” and “Alinsky-like attacks like Barack Obama,” Cruz continued the attack.
“What [Rubio] knows is that the old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists,” Cruz countered. “The new program covers nearly 100 percent. That gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism, and he knows that that’s the case.”
A shocked and concerned Sen. Rubio responded,
“Let me be very careful when answering this because I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information,” Sen. Rubio said. “So let me just be very clear. There is nothing that we are allowed to do under this bill that we could not do before.”
Rubio’s response, suggesting Cruz might have revealed classified intelligence, raised many eyebrows, including those of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Burr’s Communications Director, who sent this tweet immediately after Cruz’s comments:
But it appears that for now, Sen. Cruz is in the clear.Â
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Image: Screenshot via CNN/YouTube